Friday, September 9, 2011

Collin family of Harlow, Essex, a missing link

William Collin marriage 1717

In the continuing hunt for my missing ancestral link, I am now skirting around various areas of Essex, trying to find out which Mr Collin was a wheelwright where and when. I guess many, if not most, villages had a wheelwright in the 18th and 19th centuries, it just seems too much of a coincidence that the Collin families of Quendon, Chickney, Clavering and some of them in Saffron Walden had Wheelwright-ing as a business, as did my Great x 4 grandfather Harvey Collin in Harlow.

Harvey is the one we are trying to find. I've got no images of him, though the image in the recent post was of his descendants when they had the Harlow Cycle shop, and very little information. All I really know is:

Harvey Collin was buried in Harlow in 1831 aged 84, so born around 1747. Unfortunately the Harlow registers of his time were stolen at some point and the info in them was lost. An attempt was made to make up the register again using local knowledge and some other records, and some of Harvey’s family are noted in it, but not his birth. And that’s what I am trying to find.

I am actually trying to find a connection between him and a William Collin born 1719. This William married a Sarah Harvey in 1744, in Saffron Walden, which is where my Grandfather the Rev Hugh George Collins said our family hailed from. Just seems a bit of a coincidence that William should marry a Harvey two years before a Harvey Collin is born, and that they were both wheelwrights, though some distant apart.

Anyhow, this morning’s free time will be used to search through more, probably unrelated, Collin families in Essex, to see if there are any more clues to the birth of Harvey Collin 1747.